Jack Kerouac's childhood and adolescence were lived at a pitch of romantic intensity and fulfillment rarely equaled in his adulthood, when he became tormented, and often paralyzed, by conflicting sexual passions. After becoming a writer, he addressed
the sublimity and lewdness of what he called "the littleboy loves of puberty" and "the kick of sex and adolescent lacerated love" with perhaps unprecedented depth and insight, both in the four "Lowell novels"
about his youth--The Town and the City, Dr. Sax, Maggie Cassidy, and Visions of Gerard--and in a newly published 1950 letter to his friend Neal Cassady.

The letter marked Kerouac's first attempt to write in a totally honest, spontaneous, confessional way, a style that became the foundational rock for
On the Road and all the books that followed. Jack sensed that he and Cassady were to be the architects of a dawning American literary renaissance, but first he had to empty his heart to Cassady. The "agonized cock of the matter,"
he wrote Neal, led straight to his childhood, and his choice of words clearly shows that Kerouac saw his life as a sexual drama, as indeed it would prove to be, as he moved restlessly from homoerotic to bisexual and heterosexual liaisons.

Until high school, he expressed his sexuality, as do many boys, almost entirely in homoerotic terms. These early emotions were recounted with lyricism and obsessiveness in Kerouac's correspondence with Cassady and later
in Dr. Sax, Maggie Cassidy, and Visions of Gerard. In Kerouac's world, children not only fall passionately in love, but "love each other like lovers," as he wrote in Maggie Cassidy. His account of his
nine-year-old brother Gerard's passion for Lajoie, a grade-school friend, was confined, in Visions of Gerard, to voyeurism and genital fondling, but Kerouac went much further as a child, he confessed in a 1951 letter to Cassady.
At five, he enjoyed masturbatory "pissadventures" with two other five-year-olds, Ovila "Banana" Marchand and Ovila's twin brother, Robert. Though the exciting episode with the twins stimulated Kerouac's curiosity
about girls, it also led to his "dream-fear of homosexuality, he admitted to Cassady. In his teen years, though other biographies fail to mention it, there occurred an extraordinary, protracted French kiss between Jack and one of
his adolescent buddies, in front of his parents and a number of friends, which is unflinchingly described in Maggie Cassidy, as is a full-fledged "juvenile homosexual ball" in
Dr. Sax. The incredibly varied emotional reality of his childhood and youth provided the groundwork for the magnificently complex web of relationships that sparked Kerouac's novels, even while they turned his personal life
into a battleground.

The publication of his Selected Letters in 1995 went a long way toward confirming the autobiographical nature of Kerouac's novels, but during his lifetime he told many people, including myself, that "every
word I write is true." In the preface to Big Sur, he wrote, "My work comprises one vast book like Proust's... seen through thc eyes of poor Ti Jean (me), otherwise known as Jack Duluoz." The commonly held assumption
of all Kerouac scholars and aficionados is that his works are thinly veiled accounts of real people and actual events. In this book as in other biographies, stories are recounted with real people's names as accurate accounts of real
events. Throughout, I have relied on the well-researched character key put together by pioneering Kerouac scholar Ann Charters and expanded by Barry Clifford, Lawrence Lee, and Dave Moore, and by others such as Gore Vidal, who in their
memoirs have acknowledged their part in Kerouac's life. Because of these character keys, I, like other Kerouac biographers, have been able to rely on fictional works as primary nonfiction sources. The presumption of every Kerouac
scholar, for example, is that the character "Japhy Ryder" in The Dharma
Bums is Gary Snyder, that "Cody Pomeray" in Visions of Cody is Neal Cassady, and that "Mary Lou" in On the Road is LuAnne Henderson. Such attribution has not been signaled in the text in every instance but has been
indicated in the notes section. As Kerouac's biographer, I have attempted to cross-check everything in his novels, using not only his letters, but also interviews and numerous other primary and secondary sources. The greatest help,
of course, was having been his editor at Coward-McCann, Inc. for some of his most important work. Even prior to contract negotiations for Vanity of
Duluoz, Kerouac assured me that his fiction was entirely factual, and that he hoped future biographers, if there were any, would regard his oeuvre as his truthful autobiography.

During the time I knew him, Kerouac attempted to trace his "agonized cock" even further back than childhood, digging deeply into his family's roots. I vividly remember the day in the 1960s when he rang my
office at 200 Madison Avenue. A former English major, just turning thirty and in my first publishing job, I still got cold chills every time my secretary, Ann Sheldon, came to my door or buzzed me on the intercom and said Jack Kerouac
was calling. Though his books weren't selling well any more, everyone remembered him as the wild rebel who'd shaken up the world a few years previously with the groundbreaking, best-selling On the Road. On the phone, in
a voice that was still bright and boyish, he told me he was going to France to discover his roots. Convinced he was the scion of Louis Alexandre Lebris de Kerouac, a noble Breton, he was off to do genealogical research in the Paris libraries
and then to locate his ancestor's hometown in Brittany. When he returned a few weeks later, he told me that he'd given up his search in Brest. I didn't take his pretensions to aristocratic birth seriously, believing, along
with James Joyce's biographer Richard Ellmann, that "the best dreams of noble ancestors occur on straw beds."

Kerouac, who began life as a poor mill-town boy in Lowell, Massachusetts, unfortunately never lived long enough to see his aristocratic claims borne out. In 1990, twenty-one years after Kerouac's death in 1969, a distant
Canadian relative, Colette Bachand Wood, discovered the family's ancestral home not far from Brest. The elegant gray stone Chateau de Kerouartz (one of the many spellings of the clan's name) sits on a hill in Brittany, France,
near the town of Lannilis. Throughout Kerouac's novels and in other biographies, the family's coat of arms is reported to bear the inscription, "
Aimer, Travailler, et Souffrir" ("Love, Work, and Suffer"), but when Ms. Wood came upon the coat of arms at Chateau de Kerouartz, she discovered a silver sable, three iron crosses, and the motto, "Tout en l'honneur de
Dieu" ("All in the name of God").

Taken together, the two inscriptions sum up Kerouac's brief but fascinating life, which was passionate, productive, painful, and pious. But neither begins to suggest the transformative effect that Kerouac had on modern
society. Only in the 1990s, nearly forty years after the publication of On the
Road, would he come to be recognized as one of the major novelists of the twentieth century. The critical revaluation that greeted the long-anticipated release of his Selected Letters in 1995 reflected a popularity that had been growing for
some time. Unfortunately, when I knew him in his last years, he was unread and forgotten.

At some point in their illustrious history, Kerouac's ancestors emigrated from France to Canada. Then, in 1890, tired of scratching potatoes from the frozen soil of Quebec, they drifted to New England and found work in the mill towns along the Concord
and Merrimack Rivers, where the Industrial Revolution had begun earlier in the nineteenth century. Jack's grandfather, Jean-Baptiste, built a home at 16 Pierce Street, in Nashua, New Hampshire, forty miles north of Boston.

The French Canadians were called Canucks, and spoke a crude patois,
joual, which led to their being scorned as outsiders. They lived in ghettos called "Little Canadas," intermarried, and regarded everyone outside their light little community with a suspicion bordering on paranoia. Unfortunately,
their narrow-mindedness and racism found their way into Kerouac's novels, but their unity and bravery are also woven into his life and work. For the despised Canucks, survival became a mystique. They called it "
la survivance."

Drinking was one method of survival, and alcoholism ran in the Kerouac family. Jean-Baptiste loved vodka, and made it from potato peels. His son, Leo, Jack Kerouac's father, born in 1889, was also a drunk. Leo was blue-eyed,
black-haired, and handsome--five-foot-seven and two hundred pounds of solid muscle, including a neck worthy of Atlas, and thick eyebrows that darted straight across his nose. True to his fiery astrological namesake, Leo was both a moody,
philosophical man and a notorious good-time Charley who bounced between pessimistic resignation and a raging ambition for money and prestige. On the basketball court at the local Y, he was a fierce competitor, and his powerful legs seemed
inexhaustible. In Leo's late teens, he maneuvered himself out of the sawmills and into a job at the Nashua
Telegraph as an apprentice printer. Later, he worked as a reporter and typesetter at the French newspaper L'Impartial. Then, around 1912, the owner sent him fourteen miles down the Merrimack River to Lowell, Massachusetts, a rough textile
and tenement town, to work on another of his newspapers, L'Etoile.

Leo's relatives in Lowell noticed that he liked his whiskey but couldn't hold it. On dates, he often ended up "breaking the furniture, in uncontrollable fury," his relative Cecile Plaud recalled in 1981.
She also remembered Leo's "beautiful black hair and deep-set eyes," assets that no doubt attracted pretty Gabrielle Ange L'Evesque, his future wife. Alcohol flowed freely in Gabrielle's family, too. Her father
had been a bartender and tavern owner in Nashua. Both parents died early, leaving her an orphan at sixteen. She worked as a housemaid for aunts and uncles, and then went into the New England shoe factories, where her work as a skiving
machine operator left her fingers permanently stained by black dye. At twenty, Gabrielle was a short, stocky, rosy-cheeked young woman with large blue eyes, coal-black hair, and a sunny disposition. She met Leo in Nashua and married him
shortly thereafter, on October 15, 1915, not because she found him sexually appealing but because she thought he would save her from a life of servitude. A man's man, a heavy smoker, a reckless gambler, and a hard drinker, Leo provided
Jack Kerouac's ideal of masculinity. It was ironic that Jack admired Leo's "virility," because according to novelist Gore Vidal, later one of Jack's sex partners, Leo was a "pansy." In Visions of Cody,
Jack wrote that his father often appeared as a woman in his dreams, as "one-legged," and as "Louise," the name of a handicapped aunt--all suggesting that Jack not only sensed his father's homoeroticism, but, true
to the mores of his time, considered it a crippling drawback rather than a natural form of sexual expression.

Though Gabrielle appeared to be strong, she was as emotionally vulnerable and prone to alcoholism as Leo was. Devout, volatile, insecure, suspicious, and almost pathologically stubborn, she refused to learn English, and
continued speaking bastardized French, or joual, throughout her life. Jack Kerouac understood no English until he was six and spoke halting English until he was eighteen. His feeling that his life was tragic began with his difficult
birth as a blue baby, and was exacerbated by a traumatic experience involving his older brother, Gerard, which he later described in his autobiographical letters to Cassady.

Jack, or "Ti Jean" ("Little John"), as he was known, was born on March 12, 1922, at 9 Lupine Road, in the upstairs apartment of a shabby duplex building in a Lowell slum called Centralville. He was delivered
at home by Dr. Victor Rochette, whom Kerouac later described as a lonely, desolate man, unwanted and unloved. According to a neighbor, Reginald Ouellette, Dr. Rochette's wife had died in childbirth and he'd never remarried, which
struck Jack, who grew up in a close-knit family that spoiled him, as tragic. In a December 28, 1950, letter to Cassady, Kerouac disclosed that his birth occurred at 5 P.M. and that Gabrielle later gave him a blow-by-blow account of his
delivery. As Jack was born, his mother could hear Pawtucket Falls a mile away, crashing into the Merrimack River, heavy with spring-thaw snow and ice. Her lurid description of the way he was forcibly dragged from her body, and then yelled
at and spanked into life, led to his belief that birth was the beginning of the tragedy of consciousness, the dance of life that ends in death. The processes of nature, which most writers extol as symbols of renewal and eternal life, were
always seen darkly by Kerouac.

According to Jack Kerouac's certificate of baptism, Rev. D. W. Boisvert baptized him as Jean Louis Kirouac on March 19, 1922, at the Parish of Saint Louis-de-France, in Centralville. This odd-looking subterranean church
was originally the basement of what had been planned as a grand cathedral, but the poor Franco-Americans of Centralville had never been able to complete it. As a result, one walks down to the auditorium, rather than up, as if entering
hell rather than heaven. The infant's godfather was an uncle from Nashua named Jean-Baptiste Kirouac Jr., whose wife, Rosanna Dumais Kirouac, was also present as a sponsor. Ti Jean was the youngest of Leo and Gabrielle's three
children. Francois Gerard had been born August 23, 1916, and Caroline ("Nin") on October 25, 1918.

The family constantly moved around town, in and out of apartments and tenements, as Leo squandered his salary on gambling and booze and ran from landlords and other debtors, according to their neighbors in Lowell. Altogether,
they made twenty moves in twenty years. But Ti Jean quickly blossomed into a chubby, healthy baby. His description of Gabrielle Kerouac in a letter to Cassady makes her sound like the mother of every child's dreams, a woman born to
nurture and comfort. Even in the Great Depression, when some neighbors were subsisting on lard sandwiches, she set a table groaning with delectables: crepes with maple syrup, sausage, and chocolate milk; pork meatball stew with onions,
carrots, and potatoes; and home-cooked hot cherry pie with whipped cream. Ti Jean felt secure in her arms, resting his cheek against her smooth brown Art Deco bathrobe as she rocked him and sang French songs. He never denied the sexual
nature of his love for his mother, and proudly told Cassady in a 1951 letter that, as a small child, he'd permitted her to fondle his anus. She'd taken him along' to a sewing bee at the home of one of Leo's business
associates, and as the women sat around the table, she took Jack's clothes off, placed him across her lap, and started pulling tapeworms, or some form of parasite, from his "ass-hole," he wrote. Though he insisted that all
French-Canadian mothers enjoyed picking at their offspring, there could be little doubt that something had gone seriously awry in this household.

Uncritically portrayed in other biographies, Ti Jean's brother, Gerard Kerouac, could at times be a rather nasty brat who slapped Ti Jean around without mercy, but he was also capable of great kindness and generosity.
Gabrielle made no secret that Gerard was her favorite, and no doubt one of the reasons she indulged him was that he suffered from rheumatic fever, a disease that was carrying away children by the thousands in the 1920s, before the advent
of penicillin and heart-valve transplants. His condition was exacerbated by the toxic, sometimes violent atmosphere at home. Both parents were combative drunks, forever fighting over Leo's gambling, chronic impecuniousness, and whoring.
In Visions of Gerard, a tenement wife shouts at her husband, "They always told me not to marry you, you were a drunkard at sixteen," and her husband retorts, "Aw shut ya big ga dam mouth. I gave you your money, I'm
goin to work, I'll be gone all night, you oughta be satisfied, ya cow." In such a household, cringing, innocent children catch the disease of alcoholism years before they take their first drink.

The frail, neurotic Gerard attended Saint Louis-de-France Elementary School, where he impressed the priests and nuns with his precocious spirituality, but he was also an earthy, lusty boy, obsessed with the "little
ding-dong" ("sa tite gidigne") of Lajoie, a classmate who stood next to him at the urinals during recess. When Gerard and Lajoie finished peeing, they went into a corner and became engrossed with each other's
genitals. It would have remained a typical childhood incident of no particular significance had it not been for a later episode that left Ti Jean frightened and traumatized. Kerouac wrote Cassady that he dreaded Gerard and privately suspected
that Gerard despised him. Gabrielle was convinced that Gerard was a saint, and was so successful in polluting Ti Jean's head with this fanatical notion that Kerouac was still talking about it in the mid-1960s, when he told his Florida
friend, Ron Lowe, "I swear to God, small birds would even light on Gerard's outstretched hands as he stood at the window."

The pressure of being the "brother of Jesus" carried too high a price, and Ti Jean came to view Gerard with a mixture of love and loathing. Gerard absolutely doted on Ti Jean, turning him into a helpless emotional
hostage. Ti Jean was so comfortable cuddling in bed with Gerard in the morning that he never wanted to get up. Gerard was convinced that the Virgin Mary herself had appointed him Ti Jean's protector. He deliberately frightened Ti
Jean with ghost stories so that he could rush to the terrified child's rescue. Even at three years old, Ti Jean had erotic feelings for Gerard, and that was the "agonized cock of the matter," Jack wrote in a 1950 letter
to Cassady. And Kerouac's 1956 novel, Visions of Gerard, swarms with erotic references such as "kissable Gerard," whose breath was "like crushed flowers." To kiss Gerard, Kerouac recalled, was like "kissing
a lamb in the belly or an angel in her wing."

At the urinals in school, Gerard finally became so enamored of Lajoie that he confessed everything to a priest, who made him say fifteen Hail Marys. Around the same time, Ti Jean received a weird midnight visitation from
Gerard as he lay in his crib. He awoke to see Gerard hovering over him, looking "implacable" (defined in American Heritage Dictionary as "grim, inexorable, merciless, remorseless, unrelenting, unyielding, intransigent,
unbending"). Kerouac later confirmed to Cassady that Gerard seemed to be "intent on me with hate" that night. After the incident, Ti Jean became so shy that he refused to let anyone see him naked. At Salisbury Beach, someone
offered him five dollars if he'd put on his bathing trunks, but he absolutely refused. "Nobody was going to see me part naked in those days," he recalled. The emotional difficulties Jack experienced in adulthood seem to
have stemmed in part from the trauma with Gerard, which he defined in his letter to Neal as the root of all his "mysteries."

Gerard's own emotional deformities sprang largely from the unnatural role thrust upon him as the oldest son in a troubled, alcoholic home. Sometimes Leo staggered in at 10 A.M., his poker games having lasted all night
or even through an entire weekend. He also played the horses and spent eight hours a day in a bookie joint. "You no good basted," yells a beleaguered mill-town wife in Kerouac's The Town and the City, possibly echoing
Gabrielle. "I haven't got enough money to buy a dress, I have to wait here while you go drinkin' and whorin' all over the country." Witnessing the scene, young Joe Martin feels a deep sense of shame, which is typical
of children of alcoholic parents. In Leo's absence, nine-year-old Gerard, even in his weakened condition, took on the role of surrogate husband to Gabrielle and father to Ti Jean and Nin, doing his best to hold the shattered household
together. One night, Gabrielle lay "flopped in despair" on the couch, racked by a splitting headache, while Leo was away at a poker game. Even though it was freezing outside, Gerard offered to go to the pharmacy for a bottle
of aspirin, and Gabrielle permitted him to do so, calling him "my golden."

Despite his dissolute lifestyle, Leo prospered as a businessman during Ti Jean's first years. He moved up from L'Etoile to become an insurance salesman, and then went into business for himself, establishing
Spotlite Print at 463 Market Street, near a canal in downtown Lowell. He published weekly programs for local movie and burlesque houses, as well as the Lowell
Spotlite, a theatrical newspaper featuring humorous reviews of vaudeville and movie attractions. Driven to succeed, Leo also worked as L'Etoile's advertising manager at 26 Prince Street, and even tried his hand at political commentary,
contributing a controversial column to another small paper, the
Focus. He took intemperate potshots at officials in City Hall and began to make enemies in high places. But Kerouac would remember him, in a letter to Neal, as a dynamic, jovial young hustler. With Leo's rare combination of
editorial acumen and business know-how, he might have become a publishing giant had he not permitted his drinking and gambling to hold him back. "I see now his true soul, which is like mine--life means nothing to him," Jack once
observed. In the Kerouacs' divided household, Jack sided with his mother against his father, accepting her judgment that Leo was "a drunkard and didn't... give a shit." Cecile Plaud once commented on the striking physical
resemblance between Jack and his father, citing their black hair, pensive expressions, and "beautifully cut" features. Realizing that Jack was a "star-crossed victim of heredity" filled her with a feeling of "tragic
deja vu." She feared that a hard life was ahead for Jack as the son of an alcoholic.

Gabrielle was also a heavy drinker, and the Kerouac home was often the scene of boisterous celebrations, especially after the move from Lupine Road to Maiden Lane. On New Year's Eve in 1924, at the stroke of midnight,
Ti Jean awoke from a deep sleep as his room filled with drunks wearing party hats. Laughing and yelling, the revelers swarmed all over the children, kissing and slobbering.

Years later, research into the lives of children of alcoholic parents revealed that such children hate themselves, their parents, and life in general. As Kerouac grew up, he came to blame himself for his parents' drinking,
his mother's unhappiness, his father's joblessness, and even his brother's death. In a letter to Cassady, Kerouac revealed that William S. Burroughs had once subjected him to lay analysis and had concluded that Kerouac wanted
Gerard to die. At the same time, Ti Jean was fiercely possessive of his brother. "Jack was jealous and didn't like the idea of anyone else being there with Gerard," recalled Roger Ouellette, Reginald's brother and a
childhood neighbor of the Kerouacs. "I was asked to leave without staying there too long," he added.

Ouellette's sister, Pauline, saw Gerard in the spring of 1926, sitting in the backyard on Beaulieu Street swathed in blankets, though the day was warm and sunny. She described him as looking "sickly, very pale,
and light-haired. His mother hovered over him. There was nothing exceptional about him. He was like any other kid, [but] if you've ever lost a child, you would understand." Gabrielle eventually crumbled under the strain, suffering
a nervous breakdown at the age of twenty-nine. Kerouac was four years old in 1926 when his family went "crazy," he later wrote in the "88th Chorus" of
Mexico City Blues. That was the year that Gerard died, at nine years of age, and the strange experiences of his last days, conveyed to Kerouac over the years by his mother, had an enormous impact on Kerouac's work and marked
the beginning of what he called his "immortal idealism."

Just before the end, Gerard said he'd seen a vision while sitting in catechism class at Saint Louis-de-France. The Virgin Mary appeared to him, her robes billowing behind her, held aloft by thousands of bluebirds. Then
he saw himself ascending to heaven in a white wagon pulled by snowy lambs. Coming out of his trance, he told a startled nun that she should never again be afraid of anything, because everyone was already in heaven, though no one knew it.
"All is well," he added. "Practice kindness. Heaven is nigh."

His death was gruesome. The specific cause, as diagnosed by Dr. Nathan Pulsifer, was "purpura hemorragica," bleeding of such furious and uncontrollable intensity that his skin turned purple and he choked to death
on his own blood, screaming, suffocating, and writhing in agony. Convinced he was a saint, nuns from school hovered about his bed and recorded his dying words, which concerned "the unreality of death (and life too)... the calm hand
of God everywhere slowly benedicting." Gerard's "visions," as filtered through Gabrielle's superstitious Canuck mind, became the bedrock of Kerouac's adult philosophy, bolstered by his discovery of Buddhism
and his continuing faith in what he called "my sweet Christ."

From these ethical systems and from his own wrenching experience, Jack forged his belief that the ultimate answer is to be found in the shimmering golden emptiness of the here and now, a concept in which eternity and the
present moment are one and the same. In the 1960s, as Kerouac evolved into the spiritual leader of the Beat Generation (along with Allen Ginsberg), he returned again and again to Gerard, his childhood inspiration. "I marvel at my
love for him," he wrote thirty years after his brother's death. According to Gerard's death certificate, he expired at 11:45 P.M. on June 2, 1926. It was a significant date in American letters, for Gerard would haunt the
life and work of Jack Kerouac, sending him on a passionate search for male companions to replace his lost brother--a search that culminated with Neal Cassady and On the Road--and also inspiring the luminous Visions of Gerard,
a novel of magical grace and the author's personal favorite.

Gerard was buried in Nashua, New Hampshire, in the St. Louis de Gonzague Cemetery, named after the patron saint of Catholic youth. Kerouac's often-quoted statement that he had a "beautiful" childhood, originally
written on a Viking Press publicity questionnaire, misled many of his biographers. Though his later boyhood in Pawtucketville was indeed gleeful, his earliest years in Centralville, following Gerard's death, were spent in abject terror.
Only his imagination saved him. His first artistic creations were but visualized fears that he once described as "fantastic flights of beauty into a world populated by saints and incredible monsters." He somehow convinced himself
that a movie was being made of his life and that cameramen were following him everywhere. He even made up a title for the film: The Complete
Life of a Parochial School Boy. In Mexico City Blues, he touchingly wrote that he was the "first crazy person" he'd ever known. His parents became concerned about his loneliness and isolation after Gerard's death and introduced
him to two new playmates, never suspecting they would become his first sex partners, They were five-year-old, orphaned twin boys, Ovila ("Banana") and Robert, wire lived in a ramshackle Victorian house on Hildreth Ridge, where
they were being raised by an aunt. Ti Jean climbed under the porch with them, and they urinated together and then left their penises exposed, only pretending to pee. To Ti Jean, it was a highly satisfying erotic "game," he later
wrote Cassady, describing his "masturbatory world." The thrilling "kick" of unlimited voyeurism and sex with Banana and Robert, Kerouac confessed, brought about his lifelong fear of being gay. In his 1950-1952 letters
to Cassady, written when Jack was in his late twenties and hopelessly smitten with Neal, he composed both a thumbnail autobiography and a plea for love. The duality of Kerouac's nature was such that, even as he sought homoerotic fulfillment
through Cassady, he implored Cassady to make him an acceptable, stereotypical male--a "wrangler" out of the Old West--and save him from the horrors of Lowell, the scene of his crippling childhood trauma. His January 10, 1951,
letter ended in a cri de coeur, as Kerouac begged Cassady to recognize how "strangely connected" they were. He was seeking the closeness he'd known with Gerard, and as Neal would discover, being Kerouac's brother
was a tall order indeed.